Flipped

Next step is to glass tape the inside seams.

The ends will be watertight storage with hatches, and there may be seats along the sides of the cockpit. The "off-centre board" will go on the starboard side.

Wired!

(See yesterday's post for details about the wire.)

Stitching up

The "stitches" of a stitch-and-glue boat are usually wire twists. I've found copper wire to be too soft, and it sticks to the glue (resin) too well, making it hard to pull out. This annealed stainless wire works great. It's quite strong, so one can pull quite hard on it to bring the parts together; and it's smooth and slippery, so it pulls out of the glue without breaking.

I started stitching at the very tip of the bow, because it looked like it would be the most difficult to pull together properly.

Poking the wire through the tiny holes from inside the stem—sitting on the floor working overhead—was very demanding! I needed my reading glasses and a light.

Bilge planks

Somehow, these pieces will go together to make a nicely curved, pointy bow!

The plank on the floor to the right is a trial piece, out of sub-flooring ply, that I used as a pattern for the final pieces.

3-D

Getting a boat from these simple designs into 3-D is pretty straightforward. Make the pieces, then start putting them together.

Below, the butt blocks joining the panel pieces:

 

I've been lax in the photo department. Suddenly, the boat is three-dimensional:

The middle crosswise piece above is the forward bulkhead, the only one of the three above that will be permanent.

The temporary form on the left will come out eventually. The space on the right between the aft bulkhead and the transom will be an enclosed locker or lazarette.

Lots of mistakes have been made already, but so far nothing has had to be done over.

Next, the gunnels.

The Anti-tri Majority

After sailing the kayak as a trimaran a number of times I've decided to just use it as the kayak it was meant to be, and I'm good with that. It sailed well, but I couldn't paddle it properly because the aft aka was in the way. It was also a hassle to put together and take apart and transport. I'm actually enjoying paddling it as a kayak since I've figured a better seat back. And I like that it's so seaworthy compared to the skin-on-frame boat, which I'm letting go of.

I still want a sailboat that I can keep at the Cadboro Bay compound, not to car-top. So I decided to research different designs. I want something not so large that I can't build it in John's loft, and not so heavy that I can't handle maneuvering it on a cart. I landed on Jim Michalak's "Mixer2", which he describes as a good rowboat and sailboat. It's supposed to be fairly light at around 100 lbs, and should be relatively easy to build. I like that his boats are low-tech, therefore more accessible to home builders.

I may be able to use the rudder I made for the kayak. This boat is 12' 6" long and 4' wide. Note that the pivoting board is on the outside, making for an unobstructed cockpit area.

The boat has quite a bit of waterproof storage space, and the large, open cockpit area is good for someone who dreams of sleeping aboard while camp-cruising. However, I can't sit flat on anything; I need a little drop for my feet. So I'm planning to build low, closed-in benches along the sides. That will make it more difficult to sleep on the floor, so I'm planning to have floorboards that lift up and sit on a lip on the inner edges of the benches, which will make a flat surface the whole width of the boat! We'll see how that pans out. And if I ever do go camp-cruising in it. . .

I thought I'd build with exterior grade fir ply (¼"), but the lumber yard person persuaded me not to, so I bought some marine mahogany ply, a great expense! But worth it, as it's very good to work with.

In the photo above, I'm tracing one side piece to make a duplicate; the bottom (or part of it) is drawn out on the sheet below that.

Instead of expensive epoxy, I'm using Titebond III to join wood parts. On the underside of the joints you see above are 4" wide "butt straps" that make the planks double thickness at the joint. The flat ends of the plywood are butted against each other, rather than being scarfed, or bevel-cut. Butt straps are not as elegant as a scarf joint, but they're far simpler to do.

I'm planning to call this boat Golightly 2.

New dolly

Here's another look at the old mast step. I had sawed the tongue off the bottom of the mast so I paired it with the angle bars I had ripped out, to show how it would have been on the boat:

The wood core goes up the mast about 9" from the heel of the mast, and the cleats for the halyard and the downhaul are screwed into it. I cut just at the end of the hollow fibreglass mast, so the fibreglass doesn't show here.

Trying to align the holes from outside and above, with no room for a head to get down beside it, was a major drag. The mast would be waving around as I was trying blindly to get the bolt to go through three holes.

New Dolly

To keep Golightly in the CBSA compound I needed wheels that would go across sand and not get stuck, and a platform wide enough that I could mount the amas on the akas and not have the whole thing tip over, which happened once at Cattle Point with the strap-on wheels I've been using. The boat would be living outside on this dolly.

I bought two pieces of 1" x 4" cedar to make the dolly with. One was rough and cheap, and that one I used for the cradle frame part, and other pieces. The other was a long smooth board of quality cedar that had a long curve in it, which I thought would match some of the curve of the bottom of the boat, which it does. I used that one for the tongue.

The tongue & gusset part and the cradle with the wheels on it are two separate units that are screwed together so they can come apart if necessary for easier transport. I got the wheels from John, and he made some hard plastic bushings to replace the metal ones that the wheels came with, which would seize up with rust in no time from the salt water. The axle is a piece of the same aluminum tubing as the akas are made of. The axle is fibreglassed to the underside of the cross-board and I put a foam core in the ends so the seawater won't get inside and corrode the aluminum.

As you can see, I discovered that I could store the amas upside-down on separate mini-akas, since I need to minimize space taken up in the compound.

Above is the way I imagined storing the boat in the compound, with mast in and rudder and board attached. This is all stuff I have to bring down to the water and assemble when I go sailing now, so having it all together in the compound is hopefully going to mean I get out sailing more often.

The aluminum tube handle visible in the above and next photos slides up and down inside a fibreglass tube that's attached to the forward end of the tongue. The tube is pinned in position: up for pushing or pulling the boat around; or down to keep the bow up somewhat if the boat happened to be bow-heavy in the yard. As it is, it's stern-heavy, so it rests on the aluminum shoe on the end of the skeg.

The handle works great because the wheels are so short that the forward end of the dolly needs to be kept low, especially in low spots of ground where the skeg gets caught on the rise if the bow is not low down. I can stay upright while pushing or pulling the cart in its optimum trim.

Here's a view from behind, showing how the sail and akas would be stored, more or less. In wet weather I'll put my car tarp over the cockpit. I'll have to make an opening in the tarp with a collar for the mast, though.

I loosened the new rudder line and it flows great now. I had a bit of trouble steering last time, as the rudder line was so tight it was grabbing instead of slipping. I had to replace the rudder line because I couldn't find the first one I made. It had some nice stainless snap-hooks on it, which I've replaced with some tiny little S-shaped snap-hooks that I found at MEC. There's so little tension on that line that the fasteners don't need to be heavy.

The red lines are a continuous line that loops around the forward end of the cockpit through a tube. Steering is done by pulling on the line on one side or the other. The black line is the rudder down-haul line, which goes to a quick-release jam cleat, which lets go with enough pressure, so if the rudder blade hits bottom the down-haul line will be released. The white line leading from the top of the rudder is the up-haul line, which goes to a jam cleat and is what's keeping the blade up off the pavement in this photo. 

All of the lines and the halyard are more things that I won't need to be fiddling with each time I go out, once the boat is on the dolly in the compound.